Fear - by Mark Sun on Flickr (CC)

As part of our MSc we’ve had to read a paper by Guy Merchant (2009) on Web2.0, new literacies and the idea of learning though participation. We were asked to provide a response on it in a form of our choosing. I thought I’d have a go with Audioboo as I haven’t really had a chance to play with it.

You can read the paper here. It’s well worth it if you are interested in web2.0 and social networking for eductaion.

My response was just a quick thing about the relationship between participation and engagement on one hand and fear on the other and how it links to reading I did as an undergrad about fear (informed or otherwise) influences behaviour in real landscapes. The book was by Yi Fu Tuan and can be found here.

I don’t draw any radical conclusions as this was more a way of recording some thoughts.

PS – Sorry about the tag cloud – slight issues following updating the plugin…

Hallam Cascade by shanerounce (CC)

I can’t quite believe that we’re already through our first semester of the MSc at Sheffield Hallam. It’s been a challenging few months in which the learning has come thick and fast. It’s been tricky trying to get back into the mindset of a student, particularly difficult in the last month or so as the family is going through a bit of upheaval (more later – it’s all good).

The final piece of work was to do an evaluative case study on a work-based project or around 3,000 words, backed up by the literature. It was originally going to be about using Glogster as a way of improving year 9 students’ skills in examining character development in a Benjamin Zephaniah novel with a teacher from Handsworth Grange Community Sports College in Sheffield.

It looked like it was going to be quite a cool project but in the end OFSTED descended and we had to can it.

Luckily we were able to try something different fairly quickly with the same teacher. Instead we had a group of Year 11s come in to do an exercise using photo-story software to reflect on their responses to the poem Vultures by Chinua Achebe.

This sort of digital media work has been our bread and butter at the CLC for years now in lots of different contexts so it was nice to be able to examine it working in more details and get some data.

I don’t claim any great insights here but in the interests of sharing feel free to have a read and give me any constructive comments. I’m releasing it under a Creative Commons license (first time I’ve actively done this).

Link to the document here.

Digital Visual Literacy and Photostories by Chris Thomson is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.electricchalk.com.

Image - surrealmuse on Flickr

Have a look at the BBC’s poetry season mini-site. Loads of media and bits and pieces about making poetry accessible. If you’re an English teacher you’ve probably already seen it but I thought I’d post it anyway.

Check out the bits with Caroline Bird in the Discover section.

I watched Simon Schama’s programme on John Donne last night. Filthy! I had no idea…

The best bit was watching Simon Schama flirting with Fiona Shaw – kind of sweet. If you’re in the UK try catching it on iPlayer (until 2nd June).

Also, check out the Poetry Archive site, Andrew Motion’s big project to make available as many poets reading their own material as possible.

We only starting to use this technology at our place about 18 months ago even though the it has been around for a bit mainly due to issues about pedagogy and our own levels of confidence. It is, however a really useful and fun thing to use in teaching and learning. Seeing people students have filmed magically transported to far away times or places creates a real “ooh” moment and can enhance teaching about storytelling methods or appreciation of place or period.

This is a piece we put together with one of our partner schools to help them introduce Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Y10′s. The actor is the school’s head of drama and the images are all Flickr Creative Commons. The sound effects came from the Freesound Project and the music from the Audio Network Library (schools’ license).

Frankenstein Introduction from Chris Thomson on Vimeo.

Tips for getting a good “key”

I don’t claim to be any sort of expert and our first forays into it were pure excrement. The following is what I learnt from making mistakes and advice from other, wiser types.

Use green or blue as your background.
The reason these 2 colours are used is mainly because it is furthest away from natural skin tones (unless you are hungover!). This way, when you remove the green, say, from the clip you don’t make your face transparent. It is possible to key out any colour, though. Just make sure that the object you are filming isn’t the same colour as the back. I’ve been told also that green screen works best for people with dark hair and blue screen for blond but I’ve never had problems with either.

You don’t need to spend thousands on professional equipment.
The best results I have had for doing chromakey work were filmed against a wall we had recently painted a lurid green (see pic).

Green screen painted wall

So long as the surface you are filming against is smooth and uniformly coloured and lit you can get away with most things. If you are using fabric, make sure that it is kept in a way that minimizes creases. Hoover it occasionally and I never let students on it with their shoes on!

Find out how to set the white balance on the camera.
You may have noticed when using digital movie cameras that if you change from filming in natural light to indoors light the hue changes slightly. This is the automatic white balance kicking in. Briefly, white light comes in different “temperatures” depending on the lighht source. Ever noticed that old-style light bulbs seem to give a warner glow than their energy saving brethren? There you go. The camera guesses the type of light it’s filming in and tries to compensate to keep all the colours looking natural, only sometimes it doesn’t quite work. Setting the WB manually tells the camera what white actually looks like so it can adjust the colours properly. How to do it? Once you have set up the screen and the camera and sorted your lighting get someone to hold a clean piece of white paper on the spot they will stand when being filmed. Zoom the camera right in so all you see is the white page. Now set the manual WB. You may notice a distinct change in the colours when you zoom out.

It’s important to do this so that green or blue are truly that colour on the clip. Otherwise you may have problems with the keying later.

Lighting – You can get away with rudimentary lighting so long as you obey a few rules:

• The backdrop needs to be evenly lit. If one bit is brighter that another then it won’t key out evenly and you’ll be left with fuzzy bits on the screen in the wrong place (called “Artefacts” apparently)
• Get as much natural light as you can. I once set up a screen facing a huge glass wall in a gym and that seemed to get good results (despite lousy audio)
• If you can get a light to shine on the actors from behind. This helps to outline then well against the backdrop and makes the shot look more professional.That’s all we did for the embedded example.
• Make sure the actors stand at least 2 feet from the screen to avoid shadows on the backdrop. Shadows make keying really tricky as your screen in no longer evenly lit. Also, remove any reflecting jewellry, glasses, props. If they reflect the bacground colour they’ll go transparent.

Clothing.
Obviously, avoid wearing the same colour as the background unless you want to look like a floating head. I’ve also found that wearing black or white is a problem for some software as it goes a little transparent.

Movement
The easiest way to act against green screen is to not move at all. If you watch the clip above we use the positioning of the camera to create a bit of dynamism in the footage. Walking on and off the shot always look rubbish as it’s all done in profile and nobody’s face looks good in profile apart from Liv Tyler. When your students are storyboarding they need to think cinematically, not theatrically. In other words, think how it will look on the screen, not how it looks then and there in the room.

Film in a quite place with as little echo as you can manage.
Audio is one of the bits which a lot of people forget about but can make real a difference to the outcome. Imagine footage which looks like someone is walking in a forest but sounds like they’re in a toilet. You can always add reverb an’ that later.

Use decent software.
It’s worth spending a bit of cash on software if you are going to do it seriously. I’ve already stated a preference for Adobe Premiere Elements as you get the same level of control as you do for their pro editing software (just about). We’ve used Ulead’s Videostudio 10 before which gives you results really quickly but not reliably. iMovie and Moviemaker can manage it but require extra downloads (imovie and moviemaker) and the results aren’t that great.

To make the editing job easier try to crop the clip so that all your are left with is a small area round the actor.
This means you only have to worry about keying out the area immediately round the actor. Watch though that they don’t move out of the cropped area or they will look like they are disappearing into thin air.

Setting the key
Some editors have an eye dropper tool which let you click on the image of the clip to tell it what colour to remove. For best results, follow the tip above about cropping then click on an area near the actor. Make sure you play around with the “similarity” settings. Basically, the lower the similarity the narrower the variation of pixels that go transparent. Conversely, if you set it way high all pixels will become see through and noby wants that, do they?

And finally – don’t worry about it!
You’re not George Lucas so nobody will care if it’s all slightly squiffy and looks like dodgy 70′s Dr Who. The experience of the process is often enough for kids to get excited about. I spend quite a long time getting things just right but that’s because I’m anal, it doesn’t make me a better person to talk to in the pub.

I’m in danger of turning into a Film Education/CP3 fanboy but I do quite like the look of this…

At BETT Film Education relaunched their website, redesigned to make it more accessible and more flexible. It has loads of great resources online for analysing films using clips and other multimedia. Thanks to their strong links to the film industry the films they examine are right up to the minute. Slumdog Millionaire is the latest.

The resources are suitable for levels from KS2-A level and are well worth a look.

The website is delivered in partnership with the South East Grid for Learning.

The main focus was producing a short Audacity show about homelessness. To complete this students had to conduct some internet research on homelessness and write a short script.

Our input was to construct a platform page to structure the research and scripting elements.

We learnt the hard way years back that just getting younger students to research using Google is not productive so part of the page was set aside for easy links to charities, public info sites etc. Time was limited in class so Amy deemed this the best approach.

The interesting bit was how they collected the information. Rather than give all the students the task of blanket researching the topic Amy gave certain students particular questions on selected charities. We then set up a selection of discussion pages so any information they found could be easily shared with the whole group. In the end it became something similar to a wiki but using discussion forums.

The next challenge was saving work as we wanted to keep everything on the platform, rather than our network drives. In the absence of e-portfolios (we’re still working on developing that strand of the VLE) we created a separate forum where students simply attached a word doc to their reply. A little clumsy on our part but effective nonetheless.

The whole project took more lessons than we planned but the outcomes were successful. When Amy has had a chance to mark the work I’ll put an example of the finished audio on this post.

I’m hoping Amy will post a comment back on this to give her evaluation on the project, particularly how she sees this sort of project developing in her future career.

It was refreshing to work with someone who was willing to take risks even during her training placement and I hope she gets plenty of credit for that.

Tom Gardiner at Birley Community College in Sheffield finished this project this week. It’s part of a wider module on character archetypes and comparing Batman Begins with the 1960′s Batman movie. For this exercise a group of Y9′s storyboarded a trailer about a superhero character they had developed. With our help they Photoshopped themselves into various environments and then put the movies in a photostory with a soundtrack of their choice. 

It was an interesting group being all boys and being neither high or low achievers they rarely get a chance to do special activities. We did it over 2 stages, the first at the school taking the pictures and the second at our City Learning Centre completing the Photoshopping and then putting the photostory together using Logotron’s Revelation Sight and Sound. As a side note, their behaviour  was excellent despite being locked into one activity for a whole school day.

This is the example we used as inspiration to get the students thinking about what they could achieve technically. (I did it – I don’t mind if you think it’s crap!)

This is the work of 2 groups.

 I really wish there was a film called “I, Penguin”. Genius!

I think the real effectiveness of this project came not from the use of IT but because of the choice of group by Tom and the focus on the preparation and writing that happened before any student got near a computer or camera.

NOTE: All the images (apart from the students’ own) come from the Creative Commons section of Flickr. I meant to give credit for them but neglected to keep the URL’s. My apologies to the owners. If the images are yours and you would like credit please leave a comment and I will amend the post.

The music was taken from the Audio Network Production Library (on schools’ broadband package.